Yanni Florence
Footpaths
11 March - 18 April 2026
Yanni Florence’s photographic works present poetic, serial studies of sites and surfaces of everyday public life: previous series include Trees and Fences, Tram Windows, Southland, and in this new body of images, Footpaths. With a background in book design, architecture, and film making, Florence’s photographic sensibility is shaped by a honed attention to how the framing and sequencing of images can shift how we encounter and make sense of the world. His photographs emphasise peripheral elements of the local built environment, that are often overlooked as ‘background’, as detailed sites of cultural inscription.
The semi-abstracted photographs in Footpaths catalogue details of pedestrian walkways around Naarm/Melbourne. Seemingly ubiquitous, odd grids and lines of concrete, bitumen, gravel and bluestone are re-encountered and scrutinised as a taxonomy of highly nuanced variations of pattern, material and composition. The montage-like grouping of footpath details across both black and white and hand-coloured photographic prints accentuate encounters and phenomenological experience with details of the material world.
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Yanni Florence is a book designer, photographer and film maker. He co-founded the art publication Pataphysics Magazine in 1989. In 1997 he completed a Bachelor of Architecture at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. There are eight published books of his photographs: Self Conscious (Skoob Books, 2009), Southland (M.33, 2014), Animal Life (M.33, 2014), Street Porn (M.33, 2014), Immolation (M.33, 2015), HE IS IN THE CITY (M.33, 2017), Tram Windows (M.33, 2019), and Trees and Fences (M.33, 2023). Footpaths is accompanied by a publication designed by Florence, the ninth book of his work.
Florence’s work has been exhibited in the NGV Triennial (2021), Melbourne Now at the NGV (2013) and ReadingRoom (2019 and 2022).
“Florence’s defining gesture is as direct as it is consequential: the camera is directed downward. The horizon disappears. Depth collapses into surface.
This is not a withdrawal from the world but a reorientation toward it. Without the horizon, the image no longer stabilises itself through distance. It does not open onto space; it holds within proximity. The viewer is not positioned before a scene but brought into relation with a surface already underfoot—already inhabited, though rarely attended to with such sustained concentration.
Florence has described this shift as a form of estrangement produced through proximity: when recognition loosens, attention sharpens. What appears, at first glance, as abstraction is not an escape from reality but a reconfiguration of it. The footpath, stripped of its function as ground, becomes a site in which perception is recalibrated.”
Yanni Florence, THERE IS MORE YOU KNOW, 2025
archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Rag Bartya, framed in black stained timber
44.5 x 29.5 cm (print); 48.3 x 32.9 cm (sheet size)
57 x 41 cm framed
Edition of 3 plus 1 artist's proof
INSTALLATION VIEWS
Photography: Tim Gresham
Large works:
archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Rag Bartya, framed in black stained timber
39.4 x 29.5 cm (print); 48.3 x 32.9 cm (sheet size)
57 x 41 cm framed
Edition of 3 plus 1 artist's proof
Small works:
unique state oil on archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Rag Bartya
15.8 x 10.7 cm
